Tag Archives: GPS

Science, Travel

Connect Three

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Here’s a new Trail Baboon feature – three connected topics I’ve seen this week. I would say it’s akin to a primate swinging from tree branch to tree branch, but baboons are known for spending most of their time on the ground.

1.  It starts with a nice tidy explanation of how GPS works from Jeff Blossom, who makes maps for journalist Paul Salopek’s seven-year-long globe spanning project, the Out of Eden Walk. Thanks to a group of satellites and Blossom’s maps, we can clearly see exactly where Salopek spent some time standing around in Saudi Arabia. Yes, this technology can track your loitering habits. Even when on a ambitious mission, it sometimes becomes necessary to wait.

2. Those satellites are an essential component in guiding the autonomous cars we were discussing this week. I found a lovely Google video that drives home the point that such cars would be a delight for the disabled, kids, and old people.

3. But there is always a dark cloud on the horizon, threatening to blow your candy-colored dream to smithereens. Like an enormous power grid and technology-destroying electromagnetic pulse from the sun. People (including some at the Defense Department) are considering the ramifications of such a calamity, but none more ardently than Rocky Rawlins of The Survivor Library, who I heard in an interview with Bob Garfield on the program On The Media.

Rawlings is collecting knowledge about how to accomplish basic tasks and build and operate old-world devices that pre-date the digital age. Like how to make and felt a hat, for instance.

As a person with a hat-necessary type of head, I appreciate this attention to detail. But I’m a bit leery of the alarm-junkie quality that many survivalists bring to the task. There seems to be a bit too much of the “I Told You So” quality to their planning – as if this is all a wonderfully fun set up to a supreme moment when the rest of us dullards realize they were right all along.

What priceless skill could you contribute to a smoldering Hellscape of a non-digital world?

The Baboon Congress

Recalculating A Life

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Today’s guest post comes from Steve Grooms.

Like Dorothy who was whisked away from drab Kansas to exotic Oz, I daily confront the complications of living in a new and strange land. I keep learning that things I thought were a normal part of the world were actually regional characteristics. For example, Midwest roads and streets are laid out in an orderly grid, crossing each other at 90-degree angles in predictable intervals. As a Flatlander, I took that grid structure for granted. I was amused but also reassured by Minneapolis’s alphabetical street names (Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, Girard, Holmes).

That is not the way it is here. Where I now live, land is either Steep Stuff or Valleys. Virtually all development, including roads and streets, is concentrated in the valleys. But because the roads tend to be short and forced into certain angles by the lay of the land, roads and streets cross each other at all kinds of wild angles. What seem to be major roads peter out or wander into oblivion.
This is another way of saying that streets and roads in the West interact in all sorts of crazy ways. And it is another way of saying that it is a challenge to navigate here, especially if you are a Flatland-bred senior citizen.

I would not be capable of driving to my medical clinics or car repair shops or grocery stores or my daughter’s home were it not for the new woman in my life. I am utterly dependent on her to function in this city. Without her help, I would be a confused prisoner of my apartment, incapable of venturing past the gates of this gated community.

This new woman is the voice of my GPS unit. If I have to pick up prescription refills, I type in the address of the pharmacy in my GPS. Then this woman talks me through the trip to that place, turn by turn. She tells me how far I have to go before the next turn, and she counts down the distances with precise and predictable instructions.

I don’t know much about her. She sounds exceptionally sure of herself, and she is perfectly consistent. She isn’t bossy, although she does seem a wee bit put off when I fail to follow her instructions. When she gives me directions but I am impudent enough to do something different, her voice alters slightly and she mutters that she is “recalculating.” Soon she has a new set of directions based on my defiance of her original plan. I would hate to play poker with her, for she knows her own mind totally and betrays little emotion.

I’ve learned how to interpret her instructions. For example, when she tells me I’m two-tenths of a mile from the next turn, I understand that the turn is about two city blocks away. I can’t overstate my dependence on this woman. If someone stole the GPS from my Outback, I couldn’t leave my apartment for days until I got it (or her) replaced.

Who do you trust?